There's a fascinating new paper in Psychological Science by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis on the virtues of unconscious thought when it comes to predicting the outcome of soccer matches. It turns out that the conscious brain - that rational voice in your head deliberating over the alternatives - gets in the way of expertise. Although we tend to think of experts as being weighted down by information, their intelligence dependent on a vast set of explicit knowledge, this experiment suggests that successful experts don't consciously access these facts. When they evaluate a situation, they don’t systematically compare all the available soccer teams or analyze the relevant players. They don't rely on elaborate spreadsheets or athletic statistics or long lists of pros and cons. Instead, Dijksterhuis' study suggests that the best experts naturally depend on their unconscious mind, on that subterranean warehouse of feelings, hunches and instincts.
The experiment itself was quite simple: A mixture of soccer experts and novices were divided into three groups. Then, they were asked to predict the outcome of various soccer matches. The first group was asked to make a prediction after consciously thinking about the game for two minutes. The second group was told to "blink," to make a decision about the soccer matches as quickly as possible. The third group, meanwhile, was distracted for two minutes with a totally unrelated memory task, which occupied their conscious attention and prevented them from thinking too much about sports and soccer.
The first thing to note is that sports experts are not very useful. Knowing more about the sport was remarkably unhelpful when it came to predicting the winners, as soccer knowledge accounted for less than 2% of overall match calling success. This suggests that listening to the talking heads on ESPN is a waste of time - they have no idea what's going to happen.
That's not too surprising, as there's a plethora of evidence that virtually all pundits are pretty worthless. (I've written before about the fascinating work of Philip Tetlock, which reminds us why we should never watch cable news.) But Dijksterhuis wasn't interested in dismantling the myth of expertise. Instead, he was interested in the spooky powers of the unconscious. The first two conditions demonstrated that both deliberating too much (the conscious analysis protocol) and not thinking at all (the "immediate decision" approach) were terrible strategies. In both instances, the experts gained nothing from their expertise - they might as well have been randomly picking winners.
Everything changed, however, in condition number three, that setup where people looked at the matches and were then distracted. In this case, the ability of the experts to predict the outcome was significantly improved. Although their performance was still underwhelming, the payoff of expertise (the difference between the know-it-alls and the know-nothings) more than tripled. The practical lesson is clear: The next time you want to bet on a sports game, distract yourself with a little Sudoko for two minutes. Then, trust your gut. Your unconscious knows more than you know.
The question, of course, is what the unconscious is up to. What information is it processing during those two minutes of distraction? And why is this output so much more effective than conscious deliberation? Vaughan Bell, over at Mindhacks, has a typically excellent summary:
This is known was a "weighting mistake," and it's a serious problem for conscious deliberation. When we try to analyze our alternatives, we tend to search for reasons to choose one team over another. The problem is that we're not particularly good at figuring out whether or not these reasons are relevant. In other words, we're rationalizing, which is quite different from being rational.
What interests me about this latest Dijksterhuis experiment is that it neatly extends his earlier work on unconscious processing, which focused on personal preferences. The experiment went like this: Dijksterhuis got together a group of Dutch car shoppers and gave them descriptions of four different used cars. Each of the cars was rated in four different categories, for a total of sixteen pieces of information. Car number 1, for example, was described as getting good mileage, but had a shoddy transmission and poor sound system. Car number 2 handled poorly, but had lots of legroom. Dijksterhuis designed the experiment so that one car was objectively ideal, with “predominantly positive aspects”. After showing people these car ratings, Dijksterhuis then gave them a few minutes to consciously contemplate their decision. In this “easy” situation, more than fifty percent of the subjects ended up choosing the best car.
Dijksterhuis then showed a separate group of people the same car ratings. This time, however, he didn’t let them consciously think about their decision. After he gave them the automotive facts, he distracted them with some simple word games for a few minutes. He then interrupted their fun and asked the subjects, rather suddenly, to choose a car. Dijksterhuis designed the experiment so that these people would be forced to make a decision using their unconscious brain. (Their conscious attention had been focused on solving the word puzzle.) The end result was that they made significantly worse choices than those who were allowed to consciously think about the cars.
So far, so obvious. A little rational analysis could have prevented the “unconscious choosers” from buying a bad car. Such data confirms the conventional wisdom: reason is always better. We should think before we decide.
But Dijksterhuis was just getting warmed up. He then repeated the experiment, only this time he rated each car in twelve different categories. (These “hard” conditions more closely approximate the confusing reality of car shopping, in which consumers are overwhelmed with facts and figures.) In addition to learning about the quality of the transmission and the engine’s gas mileage, people were told about the number of cupholders, the size of the trunk, and so on. Their brain had to deal with forty-eight separate pieces of information.
Did conscious deliberation still lead to the best decision? Dijksterhuis found that people given time to think in a rational manner - they could carefully contemplate each alternative - now chose the ideal car less than 25 percent of the time. In other words, they performed worse than random chance. However, subjects who were distracted for a few minutes found the best car nearly 60 percent of the time. (Similar results were achieved with Ikea shoppers, looking for a leather couch.) They were able to sift through the clutter of automotive facts and find the ideal alternative.
Of course, plenty of questions remain about this work. Is the unconscious suited for all high-information processing tasks? Or is it only good at dealing with certain kinds of questions? Are there ways to make deliberate analysis less prone to weighting mistakes? Nevertheless, this research is an important reminder that the unconscious is smarter than we can comprehend, as it processes vast amounts of information in parallel. While we're distracted by tedious chores and dumb puzzles, it's frantically sifting through the facts, trying to find us the best car and the winning soccer team. Sometimes, we just need to learn to listen.
